


Hard for the Money

by poisonivory



Category: DCU, DCU - Comicverse, Justice League International (Comic)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-08
Updated: 2012-07-08
Packaged: 2017-11-09 09:50:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/454132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poisonivory/pseuds/poisonivory
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Booster doesn't need Gladys to be his sugar mama - not when he's got Ted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hard for the Money

Ted couldn’t believe he was doing this.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he said as he watched Booster haul another couple of suitcases in the front door of Ted’s apartment. “Why am I doing this?”

“Because you’re a good friend,” Booster said, fluttering his eyelashes at Ted. “You wanna help me with these?”

“I’m not _that_ good a friend,” Ted replied. “You know, I don’t understand how you can leave a marriage with _no_ money whatsoever but twenty-three suitcases full of crap.”

“Hey, your lawyers _and_ Max’s lawyers both agreed that that prenup was iron clad,” Booster pointed out. “And it’s not crap!”

Ted pointed. “What’s in that one?”

“Hair products.”

“And that one?”

“Headshots.”

Ted threw up his hands. “Crap.”

-

When Booster had first told Ted that Gladys was divorcing him, Ted had laughed long and heartily. In fact, he’d laughed so hard he wrenched his neck a little bit, which kind of spoiled the fun. Still, this was pretty great. Booster’d been waiting for the old bag to die so that he could inherit her millions, and here she was kicking him to the curb because someone even younger – but not, Booster insisted, hotter, and having seen the guy’s picture Ted secretly agreed – had come along. It served Booster right.

Max flat-out refused to let Booster stay in Superbuddies headquarters; he said he’d learned his lesson about housing superheroes after the JLI embassies. And, well, Ted did have a whole penthouse to himself with three bedrooms he never used, and even if the guy had been driving him crazy since Max re-formed the team, when all was said and done, Booster was still his best friend.

“You know, I _will_ pay you back,” Booster said as he arranged his various tanning oils alphabetically in the bathroom cabinet. He had, Ted noticed, removed all of Ted’s stuff to make room.

Ted was tempted to hold him to that promise, just to be obnoxious, but he’d just remembered what this whole situation reminded him of. “Why?” he asked, leaning against the doorjamb. “I never paid you back for all those weeks I was living with you when you were with the Conglomerate.”

“Hmm, true.” Booster grinned. “Okay, I _won’t_ pay you back.”

And as much as he tried to fight it, Ted couldn’t help grinning in return. “Deal.”

-

Ted loosened his tie with one hand and tossed his briefcase to the side with the other. Coming home before sunset was a minor miracle for him, even at the height of summer. “Booster?”

Something about the apartment was different, and it took him a minute to realize what it was. The living room and kitchen had been decluttered: stray jackets and shoes spirited off to closets, papers and books stacked neatly, dishes relocated from funky piles in the sink to the dishwasher. It looked like Booster might even have taken a stab at vacuuming.

Ted heard a faint noise from the balcony and wandered over to investigate, rolling up his sleeves. “Booster, are you out h - _gah!_ ”

Booster _was_ on the balcony, in a lawn chair Ted was pretty sure he hadn’t owned yesterday, wearing shades and headphones and absolutely nothing else. At least – Ted thanked God for small favors – he was lying on his stomach. A tiny gold Speedo lay in a crumpled heap by the chair.

Booster looked up at Ted’s shout. “Oh, hey. You’re home early.”

“And you’re _naked_!” Ted flapped his hands vaguely in the direction of Booster’s rear. Which was tan, and glistening with oil, and perfectly toned, and oh God, Ted had to look away now.

Booster made his squinty confused face, forehead wrinkling above the sunglasses. “Well, yeah. Don’t want tan lines, now do I?”

Ted pinched the bridge of his nose. “Please tell me you didn’t tan the front that way.”

Even behind the shades, Ted could tell that Booster’s expression had turned sly. “Hey, no point in only doing one side. Don’t worry, I didn’t see any of your neighbors out here taking pictures to sell to Gawker.”

Ted snorted. “Like Gawker cares what you do.”

“Dick. See if I do your dishes for you again.”

“You didn’t do them for me. You did them because they were making you nuts.”

“True.” Booster beamed at him and wriggled a bit on the chair, to get comfortable, Ted supposed. It just drew Ted’s eyes to the flexing muscles of Booster’s back and thighs and, oh yeah, _ass_ , and he looked away quickly. “See, didn’t you miss living with me?”

Ted rolled his eyes and walked back inside. “I’m going to take a shower,” he called over his shoulder.

A cold one.

-

“So what’s living with Booster like?” Barbara asked.

Ted made a face, even though he knew Barbara couldn’t see it. At least, he _hoped_ she couldn’t see it; he tended to avoid asking her which of his security cameras she was regularly hooked into, since he wasn’t sure he’d like the answer. “Ugh. A parade of ridiculous.” He adjusted his headset and picked up the latest prototype in both hands, turning it over to see how it looked from all angles. “He gets up at the crack of dawn to work out, so he’s always in the shower when I need to get in there to get ready for work. He gets all prissy if I leave dirty dishes in the sink, or my socks on the living room floor, or something. Seriously, he picks them up with two pencils, like chopsticks, and puts them on my bed. He keeps this funky wheat germ stuff in the fridge and it stinks everything else up. He puts the toilet paper in wrong.”

“He puts it in _wrong_?” Barbara repeated.

“So that the loose end goes under,” Ted clarified. “It’s supposed to go _over_.”

“Yeah, that does sound like a pretty big hardship,” Barbara drawled.

Ted scowled. “Yeah, well, you live with it and you see how you like it.” He put the prototype down and clicked through a few of his less-important emails, the ones he didn’t have to devote much brain power to. “Plus he’s naked, like, all the _time_.”

“Oh _really_?” Barbara asked. “Does he want to move in with _me_?”

Ted felt a sudden, unreasonable flash of jealousy, and he wasn’t exactly sure over whom. He tamped it down.

“Trust me,” he said, and leaned back in his chair with his fingers on his temples, the picture of suffering to any potential cameras. “You don’t want him.”

-

Booster looked embarrassed. Ted always felt vastly uncomfortable when Booster looked embarrassed, mostly because it happened so rarely.

“Uh, listen, Ted…can I borrow some cash?”

It was the fourth time he had asked in three weeks, and he always said “borrow.” Ted knew Booster was trying to ask for as little actual money as possible, but the guy was no good at saving. Neither was Ted, for that matter; he was just currently making more than his normal rate of spending.

“Sure.” Ted dug out his wallet. “How much do you need?”

Booster squirmed. “I dunno.”

Ted pulled back a bunch of twenties and held them out. “Think this’ll do ya?”

Booster didn’t take them right away. “I’m working on setting up some endorsements in Japan. Watches, cologne, that sort of thing. I should be getting paid pretty soon.”

“Don’t pay me back in Booster Gold Man Musk for Men,” Ted warned him. “I hate that stuff.”

Booster grinned, relaxing visibly, and took the cash. “That’s ‘cause you’re around me all the time. You know the bottled stuff can’t measure up to the glory of my _real_ man musk.”

“Glory isn’t exactly the world I would use,” Ted snorted, and Booster whacked him with the cash, skipping out of reach of Ted’s return swipe.

-

“So how awful was it living with Gladys?”

“Eh, it actually wasn’t that bad. She’s kind of fun. You know she was a trophy wife when she was young? Like three times, actually – I was her eighth husband. So she told me she figured it was her turn, which, hey, fair enough.”

“I guess so, yeah.”

“And, you know, it’s nice having someone around.”

“True.”

“I mean, I didn’t love the costumes, and I felt a little silly about the whole thing, but other than being married to her was fine.”

“Well, and you didn’t love her. Right?”

“…Yeah. That too.”

-

“Here.”

Booster looked up. “What’s this?” he asked, taking the card Ted handed him.

“I put your name on my debit account. Figured it was easier.”

“You didn’t have to – ”

“So what do you think we should do for dinner tonight?” Ted asked loudly. “I’m sick of pizza, and I had Mexican for lunch.”

Booster wrinkled his nose. “Yeah, I could tell,” he said, but his eyes were touched, and when Ted kicked him in entirely justified response to that comment, he didn’t kick very hard.

-

“ _Booster Gold, get out of the bathroom right this damn minute! I’m going to be late for work!_ ”

The door opened, but Booster didn’t vacate the bathroom; instead, he grabbed a handful of Ted’s shirt and yanked him in. “Look!”

Ted looked. Booster was clad only in a towel that was clinging desperately to his trim hips. His skin was still pink and damp from the shower, and every so often a drop of water fell from his wet hair to trail its way distractingly over his broad shoulders and pectorals. He was, for some reason, holding his hand about an inch from the top of his head, forefinger and thumb pinched together, but the bizarre pose was the least interesting thing about him right now.

Ted swallowed, and hoped nothing showed on his face. Or his boxers, for that matter, since he was still wearing only what he’d slept in. “What?”

Booster hunched down and pointed with his free hand to the pinched hand. “Here!” he said, a note of horror in his voice. “I found a gray hair!”

Ted stared at him. Then he pinched the hair himself, swatted Booster’s hands away, and yanked.

“Ow!”

“There. Now you have no gray hairs,” he told Booster. “Now get the hell out of my bathroom!”

Booster gave him a wounded look and went, making a great show of rubbing the spot on his head where the hair in question had been, and using the other hand to snatch at his towel, which was threatening to fall. Ted made a frustrated noise and slammed the door behind him, yanked off his undershirt and boxers, stormed into the shower, and, muttering darkly about Booster and his stupid hair, reached down to deal with the hardon he’d been sporting since Booster opened the door.

-

“Put it back.”

“What?”

“Put it back, Ted.”

“You’re not the boss of me.”

“You know you’re not supposed to eat that stuff!”

“You don’t even _believe_ in my heart condition!”

“No, but if we’re going to all act like your alleged heart condition is real, you can’t cheat on your alleged _diet_ , because then you’ll have an alleged heart attack, and I really don’t know how to explain that to 911.”

“Spoilsport. See if I ever go grocery shopping with you again.”

“I’m holding you to that.”

“Nyah.”

-

“I’m going to kill him.”

He could’ve sworn Barbara sighed. “I take it there’s been no success on the toilet paper front?”

“Huh? No.” Ted opened his desk drawer, rummaging for a file he knew was in there. “He didn’t come home last night.”

“Because…?”

“Because he met some girl, I guess. I don’t know. I was up until three worrying about him, and I finally texted him and he was all ‘Don’t wait up.’ Yeah, like I’m really going to wait up for Booster.”

“But…you _did_ wait up, didn’t you?” Barbara asked.

Ted closed the drawer with more force than was strictly necessary. “Well, yes, technically, but, okay, that was totally different.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It was!” Ted slumped back in his chair. “I just feel like if I go to the trouble of ordering from that Japanese place that I don’t even _like_ , and we’ve got that football movie out from Netflix and everything, he could maybe show up instead of going off and shtupping some… _person_.”

“‘Shtupping’?”

“It is the language of my people, Barbara.”

She chuckled. “So are you mad because he didn’t come home _last night_ , or are you mad because he didn’t come _home_?”

Something in her tone of voice pricked Ted’s Beetle-sense. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m pretty sure you know.”

Oh brother, not this again. “Listen, Barbara, I gotta get back to work…”

“Uh- _huh_.” The problem with Barbara was that she never seemed to believe him when he lied. “Later, Beeb.”

-

_“Look at us. Two on a raft, sunny side up.”_

“What’s this?” Booster asked, leaning over the back of the couch.

Ted turned around to stare at him. “You’ve never seen _The Road to Morocco_? I’ve never _shown_ you _The Road to Morocco_? Booster, you have every right to end the friendship right now.” He patted the seat beside him. “C’mere, you’ll love it.”

Booster sprang easily over the back of the couch and flopped down beside Ted. Though Ted wound up having to explain a lot of the cultural references (and make up some of the ones he himself didn’t get), Booster liked it enough that when it turned out to be a _marathon_ of the _Road_ movies, neither of them budged.

Sometime later, Ted woke groggily to the closing frames of _The Road to Hong Kong_. He had slid down the couch at some point, Booster slumped down on top of him, his head resting on Ted’s chest. He made for a very heavy and slightly drooly but very warm blanket, and it seemed a lot easier to reach for the remote and shut the TV off than wake Booster up so that they could go to separate beds.

-

“Hello, dear. How were Wally and the Beav today?”

Booster just groaned, and Ted frowned and walked into the living room. Booster was sitting on the couch, bruised and bloodied, his costume torn. Blood trickled from his lip and matted his hair, and he was dabbing in an exhausted, desultory fashion at a nasty cut over his heart.

Ted dropped his briefcase with a thump and ran to the couch. “Jesus Christ, Booster, what happened?”

Booster tried to turn to look at him and winced. “Bizarro and Metallo decided to team up, and Superman was in space somewhere, so guess who had to clean up his mess? At least I bagged and tagged ‘em for the Met PD before crawling home to die.”

“You can’t die on that couch. It’s too expensive,” Ted said automatically, heading towards the bathroom for the first aid kit, which was depressingly huge, and some painkillers. He detoured into the kitchen to get a glass of water for the pills, and then drew up the coffee table and sat on it, facing Booster.

“Take these,” he said, and gave Booster the painkillers. Booster gave him a look like reaching for the glass was the hardest thing he’d ever done, but obeyed.

“This the good stuff?” he asked. Ted knew that Booster knew full well that Ted’s medicine cabinet ranged from baby aspirin to horse pills.

“The best,” Ted said. “Think you can take your shirt off?” The fact that Booster had managed to drag himself home and was attempting his own first aid suggested that they didn’t need the hospital or Dr. Mid-Nite. Booster had every superhero’s bad habit of pushing himself past where he should, but he’d also been in the game long enough to know to seek professional medical attention for anything life-threatening. Still, Ted couldn’t be sure - _or_ help Booster patch himself up – with the costume in the way.

“Fresh,” Booster joked weakly, but he let Ted help him tug the top of his costume over his head. It was a wreck – Ted would have to patch it later, and use the special cleaning process he’d devised for the future material. He hated that he’d gotten so good at getting blood out of Booster’s costume.

To Ted’s immense relief, removing Booster’s shirt revealed him to be battered, but not broken. He went to work cleaning and bandaging Booster’s wounds, fingers moving with practiced speed. Booster watched him dully, wincing less and less as the drugs kicked in. His eyelids started to droop.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey. This…this _is_ the good stuff.”

“It’s all top of the line _chez_ Kord,” Ted said distractedly, swiping at the cut on Booster’s lip with disinfectant. Booster didn’t even flinch at the sting.

“Good,” he mumbled, eyes closing. “Think…think I’ll stay.”

“Good,” Ted agreed. He hunkered down to pull Booster’s boots off, then eased him sideways so that he could lie down on the couch. He could, actually, just _carry_ Booster to his room, but it would be a struggle, and it was better not to move Booster just now.

Booster sank against the pillow like a weary sailor at last reaching the shore. “Can I go to sleep now?”

“Go for it.” Ted kissed the top of his head before he could think better of it, and Booster made a soft noise that could have been protest or agreement. “I’ll take care of you.”

-

“Hey. Which tie?”

Booster looked up from his copy of _People_ , where he was defacing everyone who had been ranked above him on the “50 Most Beautiful People” list. “Uhhh…the blue. Why are you all gussied up?”

Ted tossed the rejected tie onto the couch and started to arrange the blue one around his neck. “I’m not ‘gussied up.’ No one’s been gussied up since 1910 at the latest.”

“Okay, why are you wearing your glad rags?”

“These are my _sharp threads_ , and don’t you forget it.” Ted tied the tie and made sure it was centered. “Got a date.”

Ted knew Booster better than anyone else in the world, which was why he could tell when Booster deflated, almost imperceptibly. “Oh.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on, tell me.”

“It’s nothing!”

“Booster!”

“Ted!”

Ted folded his arms and waited. Booster sighed. “I dunno. I was kind of craving Thai food and I was gonna suggest we go get some. But it’s fine. I’ll order in, or maybe Bea or someone is free.” He waved a hand at Ted, shooing him towards the door. “Put your jacket on and go, Beau Brummel.”

“Booster…”

“Go!”

Ted went back into his bedroom, put on his jacket, and looked at himself in the mirror. He _did_ look good. And he hadn’t had a date in months.

When he walked back into the living room, he was wearing old jeans and an old shirt with the Federation logo on it. “I told her I had to take a rain check,” he said in answer to Booster’s unspoken question. “You got me craving pad thai, you bastard.” And he walked past Booster into the kitchen, both to get the takeout menu and so he wouldn’t have to look at Booster’s smile.

-

“Well, it appears that miracles do happen,” Barbara said.

“What do you mean?” Ted asked, adjusting his headset with one hand and flipping through the quarterly reports with the other.

“I mean we’ve been talking for thirty minutes and you haven’t once complained about Booster,” she pointed out. “That hasn’t happened since he moved in.”

Ted paused for a minute to think about it. “Huh,” he said. “I guess I don’t have anything to complain about.”

-

“Guess what.”

Ted looked up as Booster shut the apartment door behind him. “What? And where have you been? I thought you wanted to watch the game.”

“Gladys had me over for tea,” Booster said. That wasn’t unusual – he and Gladys had settled into a bizarre sort of friendship, and he went over to her penthouse for a visit every few weeks, or let her take him to a play or the opera. Ted usually ragged him mercilessly about still being whipped even after the divorce, but he decided to wait a minute and find out why Booster looked like he was trying hard not to laugh.

“Does what I’m about to guess have anything to do with why you look like you’re about to pee in your pants?” he asked.

“I do not!” Booster said indignantly. He sat down on the couch next to Ted anyway. “Gladys’s best friend Mavis was over. Well, really best frenemy.”

Ted shook his head. “No. I don’t believe you actually know a pair of aging best friends named Gladys and Mavis.”

“Best _frenemies_.”

“Either way.”

“Are you going to let me tell the story or not?” At Booster’s frustrated look, Ted was silent. “Thank you. Anyway, while Gladys was in the kitchen, Mavis cornered me and…well, she sort of proposed?”

Ted stared. “What?”

“Well, you know,” Booster said, as if Ted must also have obscenely wealthy women proposing to him all the time. “She gave me the old once-over and made a lot of breathy comments about how lonely she’s been since her last divorce and how I must miss living in the lap of luxury and how much she’d love to have a big strong hero around the house. And then she grabbed my ass.”

Ted gaped at him. “…Are you kidding?”

“Nope!” Booster put his feet up on the coffee table and folded his arms behind his head. “Looks like yet another lady has succumbed to Gold Fever. Although it’s probably at least fifty percent just to piss off Gladys. Anyway, I’m thinking I might go for it.”

Ted gaped even harder. “You... _what?!_ ”

“Well, why not?” Booster asked, heedless of Ted’s darkening expression. “I mean, Mavis is kind of fun, and I think she might actually be richer than Gladys. And I like being married to old ladies. They’re easy to please.”

“No doubt,” Ted said, voice clipped. “ _I_ certainly haven’t been able to housebreak you.”

It was a joke he might have made playfully any other time, but the tone now was nasty, and Booster looked up in confusion. “Uh…Ted? Everything okay?”

“Everything’s _dandy_ ,” Ted spat, hot with anger. “You’ll go off and marry some shriveled old creep for her money, and I’ll get my apartment back. Everyone wins.”

Booster frowned. “Aw, come on, you’re not going to start this again, are you? I thought you were done picking on me!”

“I was done picking on you about _Gladys_ ,” Ted clarified. “Mavis is a whole new ball game.” He stood up, crossed to the hall closet, and yanked out a couple of Booster’s suitcases. The rest were scattered in closets around the apartment – there had been a lot of them. “Well, you’d better get packing. Wouldn’t want to keep ol’ Mavis waiting. I can’t imagine she’s got a lot of time left.”

Booster stood up, hurt and confusion plain on his face, and anger starting to creep up behind it. “Wait. Why are you pissed at me?”

“Pissed? I’m thrilled!” Ted said. “My best friend is getting _married_. What a wonderful celebration of the deep love between two inutterably shallow people who are using each other for selfish and passive aggressive reasons! Can I be the best man?” Ha. Like he would even _attend_.

“Not if you don’t stop being a _dick_ ,” Booster snapped. “Do you have a problem with Mavis or something?”

“Never met the lady.”

“Okay, then with me actually getting something I want for a change?”

“Ha!” Ted’s laugh was withering. “It’s never enough with you, is it?”

Booster glared. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Exactly what it sounds like!” Ted snapped. “What didn’t you have here? You had money, you had a penthouse, you had everything Gladys or Mavis or whoever could buy you, no strings, and you want to trade it all in to marry some old hag who doesn’t even _love_ you!”

“No strings?” There was a bitterness in Booster’s tone that Ted didn’t understand, not that he was in any mood to dissect Booster’s tone right now. “Sure.” He shook his head. “If I don’t leave soon I’m going to be here forever.”

“Would that be such a horrible thing?” Ted demanded. “I mean, sorry I haven’t had nineteen husbands and twenty-three facelifts, but I just don’t see how marrying Mavis instead is trading _up!_ ”

He caught the “instead” too late, heard it fall out of his mouth like a depth charge to explode between them. Any hope that Booster wouldn’t notice it vanished at the slight pause in Booster’s anger, the faint line of confusion between his eyebrows.

“I…” Booster started, stopped, started again. “Are…are you _jealous?_ ”

“No!” Ted said, but it was too fast, too loud, and Booster would know, oh God, he would _know_.

“You are!” Booster said, pointing accusatorily at him. “That’s why you were such a jerk to me when I was married to Gladys! You were _jealous!_ ”

There was no way to deny it, no way Booster would believe him. Ted closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, hoping for a heart attack to come along and put him out of his misery. Nothing.

“Just…go,” he said. “Take your volumizing mousse and your wheat germ and go marry your grandmother, okay?”

Instead, Booster grabbed his wrist and yanked his hand down. Ted yelped as he was suddenly confronted with Booster’s eyes, bright blue and very round and searching Ted’s from about an inch away.

“What are you _doing?_ ” he asked, humiliation making him defensive.

Booster’s mouth curved. “Trading up,” he said, and kissed him.

For a minute Ted just stood there, stunned, Booster’s soft lips pressed to his. Then suddenly it was like someone had lit a Roman candle in Ted’s chest, and his fingers were clenched in Booster’s shirt and his tongue was in Booster’s mouth before his brain had quite caught up with the situation. Booster let go of Ted’s wrist to bury his fingers in Ted’s hair, and Ted made a small, urgent noise and tilted his head to deepen the kiss, pressing closer, all his anger and embarrassment transmuting into a different kind of adrenalin.

When he broke the kiss out of sheer breathlessness, Booster pressed in closer. “ _Ted_ ,” he said, voice a little broken, and Ted decided right then and there that he needed more Booster more than he needed more oxygen.

When they stumbled blindly against the couch, Ted went tumbling backwards onto it, pulling Booster with him. Booster was already working his collar open, was kissing his way down Ted’s throat, and Ted tilted his head back and slid his hands up under the hem of Booster’s shirt and thought _finally, finally_.

“Why does your shirt have so many damn _buttons?_ ” Booster asked with sudden frustration, yanking at Ted’s shirt so that one of the aforementioned buttons went flying.

“Just rip it, then!” Ted said, impatient. His hands slid down to Booster’s ass, the ass that had been taunting him with its hotness for nearly two decades now, and Booster groaned and thrust against his hip. Ted could feel him through both their jeans, could feel him getting hard, and it made him gasp and fumble for Booster’s fly.

Booster yanked on the shirt, buttons clattered against the floor and the coffee table, and then Booster’s mouth was on him again, lips and tongue and teeth hot and wet on Ted’s collarbone, his solar plexus, his _nipples_. Ted let out a high-pitched, embarrassing whimper as Booster’s teeth scraped across the sensitive flesh, and Booster chuckled and did it again.

With a grunt of triumph, Ted at last got Booster’s fly open and shoved his hand inside. Booster wasn’t wearing underwear – of _course_ \- and they both moaned when Ted’s fingers found Booster’s dick. The angle was bad and the pants were tight and Ted couldn’t do much but _rub_ , but apparently that was enough, because Booster clung to him and panted hot against his neck, and if Ted hadn’t been fully hard before he was getting there now.

“You,” Booster managed, voice muffled against Ted’s throat. “Pants. I need… _fuck_.”

“Yeah,” Ted agreed. He reached for his own fly, but his right hand was clumsier than his left, and he had no room to maneuver. With an annoyed snort, he pulled his hand out of Booster’s pants. Booster whined in protest until Ted shoved Booster’s jeans down around his thighs and rolled them over so that he was lying half on top of Booster. Then he yanked his own pants and underwear down. He meant to pull them off all the way, but Booster grabbed him before he could, one big hand wrapping around his dick, the other on the back of his neck, pulling him down into a kiss.

Ted moaned into Booster’s mouth as Booster stroked him, and rubbed his thigh against Booster’s erection. Booster broke the kiss on a gasp. “ _Ted_ ,” he said, arching up against him, “Ted, I always…”

“Me too,” Ted assured him, biting at his jaw. “Me too, Booster, oh God, I…wait, wait…”

Booster stopped in confusion as Ted knocked his hand away – confusion that faded into pleased understanding as Ted shifted so that he could wrap his _own_ hand around both their dicks at once. “Best genius ever,” Booster mumbled into his ear, thrusting gently against Ted’s strokes. “Why didn’t we do this years ago?”

Ted tightened his grip a little, pressing their cocks closer together, loving the feel of Booster’s hard length against his own. “Hhh…didn’t know you wanted to. Why didn’t you kiss me years ago?”

“Th…thought you were straight.”

“I am!”

Booster left off sucking a dark bruise below Ted’s ear to stare at him, then glance down to where Ted was still steadily stroking their cocks together. Ted flushed. “Well. Ish.”

Booster laughed out loud at that, and the happy familiar sound of it made Ted’s chest feel all funny – in a good way – even as his hips jerked forward. “Okay, fine. We’ll go with that.”

He kissed Ted again, fingers digging into Ted’s ass, groping shamelessly. Ted rewarded him by stroking faster, hips shifting shallowly against Booster’s, but it wasn’t long before it wasn’t enough. He let go so that he could thrust against Booster harder, pressed full-length against him, precome from both of them making it easier, slicker, dizzyingly weird and wonderful to be here, with Booster, doing this.

Booster rocked his hips up to meet Ted’s thrusts, lips pressing a staccato of kisses to Ted’s face, his throat and shoulders. Ted dug his fingers into Booster’s hip, his shoulder, babbling and only half aware that he was babbling. “Booster, fuck, yes, Booster, please, please, more…”

“ _Ted_ ,” Booster gasped, sounding choked. “Ted – !” and Ted felt a warm wet rush between them, and the look on Booster’s face was enough to send Ted hurtling over the edge with him, crying out Booster’s name as pleasure sang through him.

When his brain cleared enough for him to process the situation, he was lying with his head pillowed on Booster’s shoulder, and Booster was petting his back through the shirt that was still half on him. His pants were tangled around his legs, there was a cool, sticky mess between them, and the very expensive couch probably had some very indecent stains on it now.

Still, Ted couldn’t bring himself to be anything but content.

Booster poked his side. “Dinner?”

Ted shook his head. “Nn.”

“Nap?”

“Yes.”

“Bed?”

“Yes.”

They lurched off the couch and into Ted’s bedroom, shedding clothes along the way. Booster found some tissues and wiped them down, then made himself at home in Ted’s bed. That was just fine with Ted.

He curled up against Booster’s side. “Hey, Booster?”

“Mmm?”

“Don’t marry any more old ladies for their money.”

Booster laughed softly and rolled over onto his side so that he could face Ted. “You gonna be my sugar daddy instead?”

Ted made a face. “Only if you promise never to use the phrase ‘sugar daddy’ ever again.”

Booster grinned. “Can I call you Big Papa Ted?”

“If you want me to puke all over you, sure.”

“Aw, you’re no fun.” Booster snuggled close, then suddenly pulled back to look at Ted. “Hey…you know you’re not like Mavis, right?”

Ted cocked an eyebrow. “What, I haven’t had enough work done?”

“No, I mean…you’re not…” Booster went slightly pink and tucked his face into Ted’s neck. “I’d be here even if you were broke,” he said, voice a little muffled.

Ted couldn’t stop the smile spreading over his face, but all he did was kiss the side of Booster’s head and say, “I’d be here even if you were rich.”

He felt Booster’s grin. “Well, I _do_ feel like a million bucks.”

“That was terrible.”

“You loved it.”

“No, seriously, that was really bad.”

“You’re laughing on the inside. I can tell.”

“Good night, Booster.”

“Night, Big Papa.”

“BAAAAAARF.”

“…Night, Ted.”


End file.
